Sound City – De Klinkende Stad

Resonance at the Festival of Flanders in Kortrijk, Belgium

The Resonance Network celebrates its first anniversary at this year’s Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium, with Sound City (De Klinkende Stad). It is the network’s biggest showcase to date, bringing together the four sound installations that were realized during the first year of the network’s existence. For those who saw the earlier versions of some of the installations, the exhibition in Kortrijk provides a great opportunity to see and hear how these works evolve and ‘resonate’, when they are re-built and adapted to a different kind of space, which, indeed, is one of the motivating ideas that underly the Resonance project.

Pierre Berthet presents a third version of his Extended Drops. This work was first realized at the Singuhr Hörgalerie in Berlin (Germany). There it could be seen and heard from July till September 2010. Pierre did a second installment of the installation at Intro in situ in Maastricht (December 2010 – February 2011).Esther Venrooy brings A Shadow of A Wall to Kortrijk, her joint work with Ema Bonifacic that was first realized and shown in Maastricht (December 2010 – February 2011). The installation for Sound City is the work’s second realization.
The remaining two installations are premieres. They were finalized in Kortrijk, in the weeks preceding the opening of Sound City: Maia Urstad spent several weeks in the small Belgian city working on her Meanwhile, in Shanghai…, while Paul Devens was touring the town on a bicycle, recording the sounds for his City Chase.

_It was a hot and very sunny day, when I arrived in Kortrijk on Saturday May 7th for Sound City’s opening. As fas as I can remember (and I can remember pretty far), it was the first time ever that I visited this old Belgian city, which sprang from a Gallo-Roman settlement at a crossroad near the river Leie and two Roman roads. I walked the short distance from the railway station to the Grote Markt, where I dropped my luggage at the hotel, and then walked on to the Buda-eiland, the old part of town (named after the western part of the Hungarian city of Budapest) where the Sound City events are taking place.

The Resonance installations can be found in, and next to, the Buda-toren, the tower of a former brewery, that in the 1990’s was converted into a production house for the arts.

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_Maia Urstad installed her “Meanwhile, in Shanghai…” on the tower’s ground floor.

Some 80 radio’s, radio cassette players, and some other radio-like machines are hanging motionless, just slightly off the floor, in long lines stretching across the crepuscular space. They are all facing the (obscured) windows. My first impression was that of a regiment of soldiers, lined up for inspection. When I entered the lines, this curious army seemed to be a silent one, until I became aware of the soft static that, in short bursts, came whirling like a mist, like whisper, along the floor. Every now and then, from this side or other, a voice arose, speaking a short message. But when I turned to try and locate where precisely the voice was coming from, it mostly had gone silent again. Sometimes the language spoken was familiar. Sometimes it was not. Such is the short multilayered piece that Maia Urstad composed. Each of the layers is transmitted via a short range FM transmitter to a corresponding group of radio’s.

The soft, crackling and ghostlike voices soon gave rise to a different image: that of a graveyard, where each of the old and pretty much obsolete machines acts both as a thombstone and an – almost but not quite yet – corpse, ‘speaking in tongues’ … I only wished there would have been quite a bit more of these voices …

The following few minutes of audio give an (of course highly approximative) impression of what I heard when I walked up and down the lines that make up Meanwhile, in Shanghai…

_The fifth floor is the top floor of the Buda-toren. It is where one finds Paul Devens’ new work, City Chase. When I talked to Paul late March in Maastricht, the piece was little more yet than a soundless drawing that resided on his laptop. Meanwhile the drawings had materialized, and four gondolettes were moving small loudspeakers back and forth along a long metal rack with four parallel tracks.

Shortly before the exhibition’s opening, Paul was still busy adjusting the mechanics and lubricating the tracks. Which was necessary to assure an as smooth as possible movement of the little wagons carrying the speakers, so that none of them will get stuck during the four-part linear choreography of the eight minute dynamic city sound scape that comprises the current, first version, of City Chase.

Here’s is a short sound fragment, that I recorded during one of the City Chase‘s test rides early that Saturday afternoon:

The soundscape of the city of Kortrijk was very loud and very prominent on the day of Sound City’s opening: these were the final days of the yearly Kortrijkse Paasfoor, a mega-fair that could be seen cramming many of the center’s old squares with blinking lights and metallic constructions, some reaching as high as 52 meters. As the afternoon advanced, the sonic excitement of the fair that came drifting across the river Leie to the Buda-eiland continued to grow. The swooshing, shrieking, clanking, beeping and the mingling of up-tempo bumpings of very deep basses of multiple musics, made for a densely ondulating sonic texture that enveloped the city center of Kortrijk throughout the day, and that was pretty difficult to ignore. For, as you will know, one may shut one’s eyes, but it is a pretty tough task to shut one’s ears…

Also on the fifth floor of the Buda-toren, with its marvelous view on the city, it was hard to lock that day’s “sounding city” out, even when the doors and windows were all closed. And given the fact that in City Chase this very same “sounding city” is framed (it is tamed, in a way), the proximity and presence of the Paasfoor‘s wild, unleashed sounds, made it a rather strange experience to hear the recorded city sound fragments of Kortrijk’s City Chase parade before my ears, watching the gondolettes glide back and forth along the bare metal tracks, at times providing past-time echoes of the fair sounds that meanwhile, outside, continued to rage in real-time random force and abundance. It almost felt as if the “sounding city” was taking revenge …

It had me wonder whether City Chase should not be taken away from the city, out to the country side. And then, maybe, there be experienced out in the open? Somewhere up in the mountains, where the real-time soundscape is of an entirely different type?

An essential part of City Chase is the idea of a ‘double movement’ of the recorded sound sources: a first movement while recording, and a second one during playback. But most city sounds are highly complex, and in many cases, indeed, the (multiple) sound sources in the recording are themselves also moving, thus severely testing the limits of our ability to perceive and distinguish the different kinds of movement of the sounds that are involved. I’m curious to find out how, over the coming months, City Chase will evolve, and how the work will sound when, in its upcoming installments, the collection of fragments used in its composition has become larger. The range of the current pallette of Kortrijk sounds struck me as being somewhat too limited for a full appreciation of the idea of the work, and of the ingenious construction that underlies its realization.

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_Pierre Berthet installed the Kortrijk version of his Extended Drops in a former stable of the brewery, just opposite of the Buda-toren. It is a pretty long, but relatively narrow, space, shaped as a simple rectangular box, quite different from the spaces in Berlin and Maastricht, where the previous versions of the work were made. Pierre told me that he actually would have preferred such a simple space to start with, as it makes the setting up and tuning (of, for example, the intricate network of wires) of the installation quite a bit easier. It is maybe one of the reasons why Extended Drops in the long rectangular Kortrijk stable makes for such an impressively balanced, and very spatial sonic experience.

Here is a short impression of how Extended Drops sounded there on the day of the opening:

On the other hand, I also found that the rectangular stable space, enabling one to overlook the entire installation, as it were, in a single glance, made Extended Drops lose some of the visual attraction (and with that some of the mystery) that it had in the Intro in situ space, and in the obscure and almost labyrinthine rooms of the Berlin Singuhr Hörgalerie, a historic waterreservoir in Prenzlauer Berg.

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_Esther Venrooy & Ema Bonifacic’s A Shadow of A Wall, a work that premiered in Maastricht and in Kortrijk’s Sound City has its second rendition, can be found on the third floor of the Buda-toren. The original inclined wall, which is the heart of the installation (a patchwork of differently sized rectangular panels), was adjusted: a part of it had to be removed, in order for it to fit into the space. The decision to do so was a very good one. The low and not too large brick room with its wooden ceiling and floor appears to be near to perfect for the work.

More than in the very bright and white living room type space in Maastricht, here the inclined surface indeed acts as the ‘architectural intervention’ it was intended to be. Whereas in Maastricht the light, whiteness, and the relative small surface, but bigger height, of the room somehow seemed to keep the slope from thoroughly imposing itself, in the Buda-toren it does succeed to transform the space. Also at Intro in situ the slope was an intruder, very much so, yes; but in the Buda-toren the intruder really manages to, be it ever so gently, take control.

Though the work did not give up on any of its introvert serenity, it seemed to have grown up. I found it to be powerfully self-contained, and an easy match for the outside sounds that, from time to time, in intermittent waves, came drifting in through the door, that Esther had left open. On purpose.

_Following the official opening and reception in the Budascoop, around 17h30, visitors were led on a tour of the four installations. Then, after dinner, there were the evening performances, one by each of the participating artists.

Two of the concerts took place inside the artist’s installation, and two were done on stage, in one of the Budascoop’s concert halls.

The evening program began with a very varied, dynamic – and at times also very loud – duo performance by Esther Venrooy (on electronics & laptop) and a young, and equally versatile, Belgian percussionist: Lander Gyselinck.

We then walked over to the ground floor of the Buda-toren, where Maia asked each member of the audience to take place behind one of the radio’s. It made for an interesting way of experiencing the short, quiet and reflective radioscape that she presented.

Next we moved to the stable, for a performance by Pierre Berthet. Expirateurs et Gouttes is a two-part ‘concerto’. First part for drops, the second for vacuum cleaners. In the manipulation and control of both, Pierre Berthet undeniably is a master. The gradual building up of ever more intricate rhythmic drop patterns, giving way to the forceful swiping of vacuum cleaner tubes, and then onto the grand finale of an ecstatically trumpeting ensemble of Filter Queens, doesn’t cease to intrigue.

For the evening’s final concert, we returned to the Budascoop, where Paul Devens performed his Storm, for live electronics and fieldrecordings, based on John Cage’s Variations VII. At the end of his performance Paul managed to rest sound- and motionless for a very long time, thus forcing all of the audience to hold their breath equally long… until he finally relaxed, and invited applause. It was a forceful and worthy conclusion of a fine evening of music and sound.

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Especially for those who were not there: the following ten-minute audio track is a succession of four short fragments from the evening’s performances:

_When, after a couple of last drinks, I walked back to the hotel, the Kortrijkse Paasfoor was still going strong. While contemplating all that I had heard and all I had seen that day, I strolled along the Leie and on over the Grote Markt, where I watched with quiet amazement the quite monstrous (but many no less ingenious) machines, that were created to sell mere minutes of adrenaline pumping excitement.
With all windows of my room wide open I fell asleep, listening to the loud, excited and piercing screams of bunches of young fair-goers, that continued to fall from the Kortrijk sky.

Sound is a very funny thing, for I slept like a rose.

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Sound City (Klinkende Stad) is the Resonance exhibition (with sound installations by Pierre Berthet, Esther Venrooy, Paul Devens and Maia Urstad) that is part of the Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium. The exhibition can be visited on the afternoons of Saturdays and Sundays, between May 7th and May 22nd. Entrance is free. On Saturdays at 15h there are guided tours (participation: €2,-).
On May 18th-20th an international symposium (with performances) is taking place, entitled Listen. Perspectives on Auditive Space, curated by Esther Venrooy. Locations are the Witte Zaal, in Gent (Belgium) on May 18th and 19th, and the Budascoop in Kortrijk (Belgium) on May 20th.

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